MEP, too. Problems that break Revit for the community - Engineers and Designers speak up now or hold your peace forever

[mmeinert]

Is the reason for so few votes from the MEP community due to a sense of neglect or is the product already so mature that hardly anything needs fixing?

The core issues below have been mentioned and are unresolved for 10 years. Please vote so I can justify to keep using Revit.

1. This long-standing issue of not being able to show the electrician what specific circuits have to be removed or replaced with some larger/smaller circuit for a different load makes Revit unusable for the electrical community. Apparently Mechanical and Plumbing has similar but not quite the same issues. See https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/revit-ideas/all-system-ed-elements-maintain-their-connection-after-be...
2. The hard-coded sizing of things that carry flow and populate (panel) schedules as read-only entries is a dead-end in Revit’s program development with the disregard of engineering judgment and the empirically derived National Electrical Code. If you've ever seen a code panel discussing the NEC you know that software developers would be hard pressed to come to some form of logic plus it changes every 3 years so they’d need a commitment to follow and interpret the code. For this vote I propose Revit make the panel schedules read/writable, allowing us on-the-fly manipulation from a conductor size table (Different for SAE/Metric) similar to setting parameters for generative design and to just warn us if we get too close to physical hard limits such as voltage drop or ampacity tables. Hard violations such as conduit fill, conductor overloading and voltage drop based on load could be pointed out as coordination issues together with all other space conflict coordination issues. See https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/revit-ideas/change-how-wire-is-auto-sized-or-allow-override-for-engin...
   The out-of-the-box conductor tables should jog from the 60º to the 75º columns at the #1AWG mark per NEC Ampacity Table. 
3. Seasoned engineers should advise the programmers at Autodesk on the ins & outs to avoid missteps in coding. This community cannot explain a 900 page code document such as the NEC in forums.
   Up for vote is a restructuring at Autodesk to get Revit functional for the MEP community and to address the many remaining issues more quickly. The two Revit-breaking items for MEP above and sluggish response over 10 years would highlight the need for a separate program development group or strong "Chairpersons" (E.g. Experienced Senior Licensed Engineer that worked in multiple industries and served on code forming councils?) representing the M/E/P Design community at Autodesk separately if that’s not yet the case.  MP & E Revit product logic and ‘handles’ are different and need different solutions. 

Some more Background on item 2): I've used the RDB Link Add-in and a databases outside of Revit as early as R2011 for circuit sizing and panel schedules outside of Revit and it has allowed the flexibility to size circuits that an engineer needs. I could even feed some of that externally manipulated information back to Revit. Unfortunately wire sizes cannot be written to Revit. That was the end of hopes to do meaningful electrical engineering in Revit except that I kept hoping. Relational conductor size /ampacity tables and Read/Write access to the circuits in the underlying Revit tables would solve the current fundamental limitations and some programming on the user interface could do the rest for the everyday user. Nowadays I’d script my rules in Dynamo to get motor / transformer circuits right etc. but even then I’d need the ability to go into the panel schedule and assemble the circuit as needed.  Voltage drop can be calculated different ways and unfortunately the current implementation of “geometric center” method is less than ideal. Revit has all the information to do the iterative, precise per-node calculations per the NEC formulas.